Archive for the ‘mental floss’

From the “I Wish This Were My Desk Toy” department, here’s a video of a wave pendulum built using billiard balls. It’s oddly hypnotic, as you watch the series of individual pendulums acting on their own (swinging to and fro), but as a group they appear to interact, forming intricate patterns, syncing up and breaking [...]

It’s Like He’s In My Head
Jim takes the insane mental images straight out of your brain (or the brains of the people that email and explain them to him) and paints them.
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Digging Beneath the Vatican
Life has a great gallery of images showing a series of excavations once conducted under the Vatican.
This article quotes one from [...]

Borders between states and nations have often been met by contention. For some reason, humans have remained territorial from the beginning, placing markers on what is “mine” and what is “yours.” Sometimes, the human race gets a little creative when drawing a line in the sand, and sometimes Mother Nature does it for us.

In this video, Stanford math student Ravi Fernando solves a Rubik’s Cube while juggling. I’m pretty sure this is legit, unlike Michel Gondry’s famous backwards video in which he unsolved a cube with his feet, but presented the video backwards. Fernando’s cube shifts are necessarily super-fast, but if you pause the video, you can see [...]

Today, my biennial reminder of the best videos you probably haven’t seen online: People in Order. It’s a series of four short films in which regular people are shown in an order chosen by the filmmakers. It’s joyous, poignant, smart, and often surprising.
From IMDB:
A series of 4 short films that arrange 471 people from around [...]

Children’s author and illustrator Theodor Geisel has educated generations of children with silly stories and a fanciful way with words. Before the later popularity of his nonsensical rhymes, Dr. Seuss penned a prose work called The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, featuring the eponymous Bartholomew and his enviable collection of headwear—a collection based on Dr. [...]